To the dictators of relativism and their allies in the chattering class, the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI is seen as an occasion for celebration and a chance to lobby the Church for a liberal successor. The mischief is already underway, as seen in such headlines as: New Pope should not condemn contraception, says cardinal.

The Churchs enemies, both within and without her walls, see an opportunity to capitalize on Benedicts resignation, and the media, as always, stands ready to help. The coverage so far of the resignation has been grotesquely biased. ABC News wins the prize for the most ludicrously unfair post-resignation story: Pope Benedict Dogged By Hitler Youth Past, Despite Jewish Support.

Other media outlets have been only slightly less subtle in their distaste for Benedicts pontificate. They considered it newsworthy to report that he didnt change Church teaching, as if that fell within the range of plausible choices before him.

That the Church persists in naming believing Catholics to the chair of St. Peter is somehow controversial in the eyes of the media. Benedicts eight-year reign will be appraised intensively and, I expect, unkindly. He will be described as a diehard traditionalist, a reactionary in a time of revolutionary yearnings, wrote Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times. (Author Thomas Cahill, after John Paul IIs death, took a similar line in the pages of the Times, writing that historians may conclude that his conservatism destroyed the Church.)

Such judgments on Benedicts pontificate are wholly predictable, given the hostility with which the media greeted his elevation and its equation of liberalism with reform. Leading newspapers billed Benedict at the time of his election as Gods Rottweiler (though later they would cast him as a lap dog during the abuse scandal). He never had a chance with the media, as an executive at Fox News put it.

But Benedict was never as rigid as the media claimed. If anything, he approached non-doctrinal matters with great flexibility, a style that explains his willingness to buck 600 years of history and resign from office. Thats quite a departure from tradition for the diehard traditionalist of Kellers fevered imagination.

The medias obsessional interest in the papacy is a tacit acknowledgment of its power. Journalists may claim the papacy has weakened under Benedict, but the very fact that they cover it with such intensity belies that description. What the media treats as the papacys greatest weaknessadherence to orthodoxyis in fact the source of its prestige.

The medias frenetic lobbying for a more progressive successor to Benedict, as the Washington Post editorialized, is also a measure of the papacys enduring power and influence. Why should liberals care so much about the direction of a religion to which they dont belong? The answer is that they envy its immense power and wish to harness that power for their own ideological purposes. Out of this envy they pose as reformers who know what is best for the Church. Yet their unsolicited advice, if taken, would only weaken her.

They regard the papacy as a relic of absolutism and the last great obstacle to the triumph of their ideology. Consequently, they expend great energy in trying to neutralize or co-opt it. A liberal pope, in their eyes, would be an even greater propaganda coup than a liberal president. They think that if they could somehow cow the Church into naming a progressive to bless their various revolutionsfrom socialism to same-sex marriagethose revolutions would spread everywhere.

In the past, the Churchs enemies sought to eliminate the power of the papacy by force, even to the point of throwing popes in prison. And a few of her modern enemies harbor the same thoughts, as Pope Benedict found out. Arrest the Pope? I rather think we should, ran a headline on a column in the British press in 2010. Put the Pope in the Dock, read another headline. United Nations jurist Geoffrey Robertson, joined by atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, wanted Pope Benedict prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

But since imprisoning popes is unrealistic the Churchs enemies seek to control the papacy through alternative means. Through the manipulation of popular opinion and media pressure, they clamor for a liberal pope who will confirm the world in all its errors and surrender the Churchs institutions to the dictatorship of relativism.

The faithful, however, can take solace in the promise of Jesus Christ that that day will never come. The gates of Hell may clank against the Church, but they will never crush her.

>Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome George Neumayr as a weekly contributor to Crisis Magazine and anticipate that his timely columns will keep the conversation lively, as do the writings of our other fine contributors.

... in an April 23rd. Times opinion column, Maureen Dowd, the
doyenne of dopey doctrinaire liberalism, excoriated Benedict XVI as a Jurassic arch-conservative who disdains the if it feels good, do it culture and the revolutionary trends toward diversity and cultural openness since the 60s.

Rather, this pope is an absolutist who view(s) the world in stark terms of good and evil, (is) eager to prolong a patriarchal society that prohibits gay marriage and slices up pro-choice U.S. Democratic candidates. (The last is an allusion to then-Cardinal Ratzingers excellent recommendation, in the last election, that U.S. bishops deny communion to politicians who openly condone feticide.)

In others words, like his predecessor, the new pope threatens the slime pit the left has been digging since the late 1960s  a brave new world that has given America: 1.3 million abortions a year, one in two marriages ending in divorce, AIDS and soaring rates of other venereal diseases, 100,000 Internet pornography sites, sexually active 14-year-olds, the enshrinement of perversion as a lifestyle and the persecution of those who oppose sexual deviance, the creation of an obscene parody called gay marriage, a secularist inquisition determined to stamp out public manifestations of faith and the first fateful steps in the march to euthanasia
(glimpsed in the starvation death of Terri Schiavo).

“The medias frenetic lobbying for a more progressive successor to Benedict, as the Washington Post editorialized, is also a measure of the papacys enduring power and influence”

The left never knew, learned or cared that morals and ethics are absolutes, not transitory or evolving. The Pope is infallable on matters of faith and I don’t see where some lefty’s editorial page falls in that line of principles. So, while the Pope may not command divisions of troops as was noticed by Stalin, Church mores will not change on the command of these collosal jewels of ignorance.

The Left always lobbies for a liberal successor to a departing pope. JP I was thought to have been the culmination of the Liberal efforts. He survived 33 days. That could well have been a factor in the choice of the conservative JP II. God sometimes writes straight with crooked lines.

Actually, JPI was more conservative than JPII, and had made the mistake of announcing (not publicly, since he was there only a short time) that he intended to reverse many of the post-Vatican II mistakes and in particular, that he planned to do away with the Novus Ordo and restore the Old Mass. That’s why there has always been speculation that he was poisoned.

The medias obsessional interest in the papacy is a tacit acknowledgment of its power. Journalists may claim the papacy has weakened under Benedict, but the very fact that they cover it with such intensity belies that description. What the media treats as the papacys greatest weaknessadherence to orthodoxyis in fact the source of its prestige.

The medias frenetic lobbying for a more progressive successor to Benedict, as the Washington Post editorialized, is also a measure of the papacys enduring power and influence. Why should liberals care so much about the direction of a religion to which they dont belong? The answer is that they envy its immense power and wish to harness that power for their own ideological purposes. Out of this envy they pose as reformers who know what is best for the Church. Yet their unsolicited advice, if taken, would only weaken her.

***************************

Excellent article.

13
posted on 02/15/2013 8:17:53 AM PST
by trisham
(Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.)

Yes. Before his election, though, the left, especially the American and French Modernists, seemed to be thinking they were electing the Great Protestantizer to implement the spurious spirit of VII. The Press all over probably made more of it than was there but it was there.

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